A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Problem Solved

Of course, I love web generators almost as much as cell phone trees and have written an entire scholarly paper about them and the ways this online genre offers opportunities to parody the pseudo-interactivity of Web 2.0 and other phenomena of contemporary Internet culture. Given the popularity of tax cut calculators during the last election, it is true that the central joke of the GOP Problem Solver could be aimed at some Democrats as well. Users type in an answer in the online form that asks "What is the biggest problem in your life?" and the system generates a tax cut of various sizes.